Ben Griffin Charles Schwab win was ‘grind’ that fit his PGA Tour rise

Ben Griffin once gave up on professional golf. On Sunday afternoon in Fort Worth, he showed no quit.

Battling nerves and wind-whipped conditions on a baked-out Colonial Country Club, Griffin got off to a hot start and held on to the finish, scrambling his way to a 1-over par 71 and a one-shot win over Matti Schmid in the 2025 Charles Schwab Challenge. 

His victory, at 12-under for the week, was Griffin’s first individual PGA Tour title, and another highlight in what has been a breakout season for the 29-year-old, who also captured the team-format Zurich Classic of New Orleans with partner Andrew Novak a month ago.

“It’s nice to, I don’t want to say silence the haters,” Griffin said. “But there’s definitely some hate comments I got last night, and I used that as fuel today to get an individual win.”

Not a small achievement for a guy who once seemed destined for a desk job. A former All-American at North Carolina, Griffin graduated from college in 2018 and gained Korn Ferry status the following year but missed six cuts in his first eight starts. By the spring of 2021, struggling to find his game and faced with growing financial pressure, he mothballed his sticks and signed on for a steady paycheck as a mortgage broker. 

That he got back into golf was pretty much a fluke.

A few months after embarking on his number-crunching career, Griffen remembered that he was signed up for a U.S. Open qualifier. Since it was too late to get his money back, he decided to play and wound up advancing to sectionals, missing out on the main event at Torrey Pines by a stroke. 

His fire for the game rekindled, Griffin returned to the grind and earned his PGA Tour card in 2022. Where his first two seasons were solid but unspectacular, 2025 has been a sparkler, with five top-10s and two close calls prior to the Charles Schwab in which he held the 54-hole tournament lead.

Heading into Sunday at Colonial in a tie once more – this time with Schmid at 13-under – Griffin said he planned to put “the pedal to the metal.” And he lived up to that promise in the early goings, racing out with eagle-birdie on the first two holes to open a three-shot lead.  But he didn’t make another birdie the rest of the day, and the round became a struggle just to hold on to the wheel.

It helped that no one else made a serious run.

On a leaderboard light in luminaries, Scottie Scheffler and Tommy Fleetwood, who started the day six and five shots back, respectively, posed the biggest-name threats. But Scheffler spent Sunday mostly in idle, while Fleetwood made an early charge with a four-under front side, only to falter coming down the stretch.

That left Griffin and Schmid, who was also seeking his first PGA Tour win, in what amounted to a match-play final pairing.

There are no pictures on the scorecard, but there are in PGA Tour events. And as the day wore on at Colonial, the images weren’t pretty. With winds gusting up to 30 miles per hour, both Griffin and Schimd produced wild shot-tracer lines on multiple drives that settled in the rough, where tangled Bermuda lies made it near-impossible to hold Colonial’s small and crusty greens.

“The back nine was quite the grind,” Griffin said. “I didn’t go into the back nine hoping to hit one or two greens in regulation, however many it was. It’s just very difficult. Very challenging. I’m proud of the way I scrambled down the stretch.”

Leaning on his putter, Griffin made clutch par saves on the 14th and 15th holes, and when Schmid bogeyed the par-4 17th from a fried-egg lie in a green-side bunker, the margin was two with one the par-4 18th to play.

Winning is never easy. Grabbing a first individual win is harder still. And Griffin had made things doubly difficult for himself by leaving his approach in an awkward lie by a green-side bunker that forced him to hit a choked-down chip while standing in the sand. He pulled that shot off nicely, running his ball just over three feet from the cup. But the tension tightened yet again when Schmid, needing a miracle, chipped in for birdie from a pond-side bank left of the green, forcing Griffin to jar one final putt.

Past challenges, Griffin said, made him up for the task.

“It’s crazy how fast things can change in this game,” he said. “Even going back to when I didn’t have any status on any sort of tours. It’s a bunch of stepping stones that kind of gets you to the next part of your career. Now I’m at the point where I feel like I’m starting to show that I am an elite golfer. I can compete against the best.”